Well here I am replying to my own post. I don't have a solution to the problem I reported, but I did find an alternative solution.

I used method finder to find methods with the #String 'delete' in them. The class  #OSProcess contains a method #deleteFileNamed:  which was just what I needed. Provide a fully qualified file name as the argument and it gets deleted. e.g. "OSProcess deleteFileNamed: 'C:\MediaVault\BBC\test.txt'"

I developed and tested this on 5.2-64 on Windows. 7

-jrm



On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 3:38 PM John-Reed Maffeo <jrmaffeo@gmail.com> wrote:
This seems strange, when I run the command:
ExternalWindowsOSProcess command: 'del "C:\MediaVault\BBC\test.txt"'

I get an error, with or without double quotes around the file name.

It is strange because I use it three times in my method. The first two invocations launch external programs with long command strings. They work fine, but when I want to clean up, the process fails. The test case above, executed from Workspace, fails consistently.

It fails  in 5.2/64 and 5.2.32

I have not tried it in older versions

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latest update: #18110
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-jrm